I have a website that allows users to query for specific recipes using various search criteria. For example, you can say “Show me all recipes that I can make in under 30 minutes that will use chicken, garlic and pasta but not olive oil.”
This query is sent to the web server over JSON, and deserialized into a SearchQuery object (which has various properties, arrays, etc).
The actual database query itself is fairly expensive, and there’s a lot of default search templates that would be used quite frequently. For this reason, I’d like to start caching common queries. I’ve done a little investigation into various caching technologies and read plenty of other SO posts on the subject, but I’m still looking for advice on which way to go. Right now, I’m considering the following options:
- Built in
System.Web.Caching: This would provide a lot of control over how many items are in the cache, when they expire, and their priority. However, cached objects are keyed by a string, rather than a hashable object. Not only would I need to be able to convert aSearchQueryobject into a string, but the hash would have to be perfect and not produce any collisions. - Develop my own InMemory cache: What I’d really like is a
Dictionary<SearchQuery, Results>object that persists in memory across all sessions. Since search results can start to get fairly large, I’d want to be able to cap how many queries would be cached and provide a way for older queries to expire. Something like a FIFO queue would work well here. I’m worried about things like thread safety, and am wondering if writing my own cache is worth the effort here.
I’ve also looked into some other third party cache providers such as NCache and Velocity. These are both distributed cache providers and are probably completely overkill for what I need at the moment. Plus, it seems every cache system I’ve seen still requires objects to be keyed by a string. Ideally, I want something that holds a cache in process, allows me to key by an object’s hash value, and allows me to control expiration times and priorities.
I’d appreciate any advice or references to free and preferably open source solutions that could help me out here. Thanks!
Based on what you are saying, I recommend you use
System.Web.Cachingand build that into yourDataAccesslayer shielding it from the rest of you system. When called you can make your real time query or pull from a cached object based on your business/application needs. I do this today, but with Memcached.